Harping on my New Site

As I just spent an entire day working on it yesterday, I think I’ll
discuss how my website redesign is going so far today.

I was very upset at how outdated and messy my site has looked for
quite some time now. (N/B: It’s still the old version as I write this;
the new one is slated to go up on Friday the 1st of May.) I made it
using webgen about two years ago, and I never really updated
it in any meaningful way. And boy, does it show.

Webgen, of course, is not the problem there. The problem
rests squarely on my shoulders; I simply did not update it, and when I
did, I didn’t know the system well enough to make it
Simple and Clean. I needed a change, and I needed to tear it
down anyway, so I went looking for a new
Static Site Generator to power my site.

The reason I wanted a static is simple: I have, for most of
my life, been using older computers. And even now, as I write
this, my internet is so slow that it can’t load facebook
reliably… at least not for chatting. I want my site to be viewable,
no matter how bad Your connection or hardware is. And
dynamic sites just don’t let that happen as well as
static ones do.

Anyway, I tried a bunch out. I don’t know Go, so
Hugo had the same problems that I had with
Webgen. And Jekyll was just too powerful for my
purposes, and its cousin Octopress was too focused on
blogging.

This blog runs on Hexo, so I toyed with the idea of making
both of my main sites with it… But well, Hexo is good for
a blog, but using it for a homepage is nontrivial, unless You want a
homepage that is also a blog.

Then, I stumbled across Harp: A little “Static web server”
that takes a strict but powerful approach to designing a site and
(provided You stick with it) allows You to both run it as a server and
compile it down to static source files. It was exactly what I was
looking for, although I recognized that I had a lot of work ahead of
me: There were no themes built in that I could derive from, aside from
a simple one-page welcome screen.

I was gonna do it (almost) from scratch, but I was able to do it
right.